Contents : 2009, nr. 17
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Restless
Luc Devoldere

Introduction to the book. How good do people feel in the Low Countries, still after all a prosperous delta area? Comfortably discontented, as one poet writes? How do they cope with the way of all flesh known as ‘ageing’, with the welfare-and-happiness supermarket and with their lunatics? And were they unhappy, or just restless and bent on profit, four hundred years ago when they and their ships sailed the seven seas?

A Poem
Anton Korteweg

'In Good Time' - 'Tijdig'

The Antidote to Disaffection. Social Cohesion in Flanders
Bart Dirks

What has gone so wrong in a country that it takes a TV programme to bring warmth and solidarity to villages and towns? 'Fata Morgana' is certainly not the only initiative dreamed up by those on high to strengthen social cohesion in Flanders. And maybe the wonder of Flanders is exactly the fact that above all so many great socio-cultural associations have survived the ravages of time. But there you have the hidden paradox of the changing, but still flourishing life of Flemish clubs and associations: on the one hand it can open people’s eyes to the rest of society and to the world, while on the other it inevitably makes the Fleming a bit too much of a homebody.

Out of Utopia? Hans Achterhuis on Welfare and Happiness (with an extract from ‘The Legacy of Utopia’ by Hans Achterhuis)
Ger Groot

The words ‘welfare and happiness’ set the tone for the book with which the Dutch philosopher, Hans Achterhuis (1942-), would achieve public recognition in 1980. Later on, iIn his book on utopia Achterhuis shows extreme reserve regarding any blueprint that claims to be able to establish the ideal society by means of positive measures. As a professor at the technologically-oriented University of Twente, Achterhuis started to focus on the philosophy of technology in the 1990s. Gradually the distrust of technology inspired in him by the 1970s shifted to a more positive standpoint in which he not only recognises the merits of technical-scientific progress, but also states that culture and society are not subject willy-nilly to its evolution.

Individual, but not Egoistical. Social Cohesion in the Netherlands
Tom Naegels

The Dutch fight against 'mindless violence': it’s an echo of so many attempts to pinpoint a certain cultural uneasiness, the suspicion of social cooling, and to fight it. While mindless violence may be one of the most visible causes of a general social malaise, the solidarity hype is about more than that. Almost all social problems are attributed to a lack of human contact. Initiatives to promote cohesion are popping up like mushrooms in the Netherlands. And then there's the 'orange nationalism' and the big emotions.

A Question of Caring? Population Ageing in Flanders and the Netherlands
Maria Bouverne-De Bie

The issue of population ageing is receiving a great deal of attention internationally. In 2002 the United Nations produced an action plan with three key priorities: first, concern for the elderly and the development of this, embracing themes such as employment, urbanisation, solidarity between generations and combating poverty; second, the promotion of health and welfare in later life; third, guaranteeing a stimulating and supportive environment for older people in areas such as housing, education, volunteer services and mobility. In common with other countries, Flanders and the Netherlands have developed specific policies aimed at addressing the consequences of population ageing.

Good Taste and Domestic Bliss. Art, Home and Well-Being around 1900
Mieke van der Wal

Long tailbacks on roads full of furniture shops, traffic at a standstill on motorway exits leading to furniture superstores, a wide range of interior design magazines and umpteen television programmes devoted to ‘home and garden’: these are the visible proof that at the start of the twenty-first century a great many people are extremely interested in their home environment and want to feel truly ‘at home’ there. Of course, the increased prosperity of the second half of last century has been an important factor in expanding this interest to its present scale. But something today’s consumer will not be aware of is that the very first impulse towards concern among the general public for a good home environment actually dates from the nineteenth century. Developments that took place at that time in many fields radically changed the appearance of society. The rise of industrialisation in Europe played a very important part in this.

From Squalor to ‘Beauty’ The Dutch Approach to Deprived Areas
Marieke van Rooy

When the new Dutch cabinet took office in 2006, tackling the problem of deprived areas was high on its agenda. This was in response to the electorate’s evident demand for positive solutions to crime and the general sense of insecurity. During the hundred days that the government spent travelling around the country to take the pulse of the Dutch public, it was decided that forty districts would be eligible for a special offensive. The areas selected, which were chosen on the basis of figures relating to income, population transience and unemployment, were designated ‘krachtwijken’ (places of power ) or ‘prachtwijken’ (places of beauty). Ironically enough, the names do not refer to the actual situation in these areas but to the hoped-for future. At present these areas are burdened with socio-economic deprivation, with unemployment, low educational levels, school dropout rates, vandalism, a sense of insecurity and crime all rubbing shoulders.

Urban Health: A Tale of Two Cities. New York Became what Amsterdam once Was
Wilco Tuinebreijer
Chinazo Cunningham
Chinazo Cunningham

In this article the authors compare urban mental health and substance abuse care in New York and in Amsterdam. In doing so, they recognise that globalisation and its effects on mental health are crucial. However, it is impossible to give a complete picture, because public mental health is a complicated combination of medical, scientific, social, and political factors. Nonetheless, this essay is a tentative sketch describing how to deal with these issues. In the year 2009, the Hudson celebration year, a conference will also be organised to celebrate both: the 400 year-old relationship between the two cities and the exchange concerning urban health issues. Experts from New York and Amsterdam will present the similarities and differences in the challenges this subject poses.

Healing in Geel
Lisa Bradshaw

In Geel, a town of about 35,000 souls in the south-east of Antwerp province, Sint-Dimpna reigns supreme. There is a Sint-Dimpna Hospital, a Sint-Dimpna College and a Sint-Dimpna Church, all located right next to Sint-Dimpnaplein. The local Gasthuis Museum has an entire room dedicated to this Saint. Known as Saint Dymphna in English, the patron saint of the mentally ill has so inspired the residents of Geel that they have built a tradition of caring for these vulnerable members of society on her story. Though many places in Europe can claim innovative facilities for the care and treatment of psychiatric patients, Geel is unique in the world – because it’s been doing it since the Middle Ages.

The Trivial Pursuit of Happiness
Filip Matthijs

A 'tour d'horizon' of well-being and happiness in the Low Countries. Welfare may be a subject of ongoing concern, happiness should not. Happiness exists precisely by grace of the imperfection of our existence, in which we are, at best, caught between uncomfortable contentment and more-or-less comfortable discontent. Or, as Maurice Maeterlinck, the only Belgian ever to be so fortunate as to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, put it: ‘Being happy means that you no longer worry about happiness.’

A Poem
Anton Korteweg

'Doing Extremely Well' - 'Herrlich Weit'

Cultured Nature and Naturalised Culture. The Veluwe from 1908 to the Present Day
Pieter Leroy

The Dutch Kröller-Müller is one of the few museums in Europe to be so deeply embedded in a nature park, and the park is the only nature reserve in Europe with a heavily visited museum at its heart. Yet park and museum are inextricably bound together. The two institutions themselves also think so, as is clear from their mission statements and strategies, which are dominated by precisely that combination of nature and culture. And their visitors evidently think the same: all surveys and studies show that they too greatly appreciate the combination of nature and culture. Which does not mean, of course, that this combination is still self-evident today, 100 years on. .

Beneath the City Streets, the Beach. The Ideas and Work of Louis Le Roy
David Stroband

Louis Le Roy, now over 80, studied at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and became internationally famous from the early 1970s onwards for his innovative insights into the field of town and country planning, approaches to nature, garden design, and cohesion between man and nature.

Unveiling Dutch America. The New Netherland Project
Peter A. Douglas

The Dutch period in North America began in 1609 with Henry Hudson’s exploration of the river that would be given his name. In 1614 the New Netherland Company was licensed by the States General of the United Provinces for fur trading in the newly discovered region, and in 1621 the West India Company was chartered to trade in Africa, Brazil, and North America. The Company sent the first colonists to New Netherland in 1624, and by 1664 the population is estimated at around 9,000. While it’s clear that there was a lot going on in Dutch America, it has undeservedly remained a historical backwater. The reason was the lack of usable primary source materials for critical examination and interpretation. But the story of New Netherland warranted a more extensive analysis. But how was that to be achieved? The answer was the creation in 1974 of the New Netherland Project, leading to Charles Gehring’s translations of the surviving seventeenth-century Dutch records. This was a turning point in American historiography, and the work still goes on after thirty-four years. To understand the true importance of this work it is necessary to see how things were before.

A Guided Tour of the Gilded Cage. Jan Van Loy Takes the Reader by the Ear (with an Extract from ‘Alpha America’ by Jan Van Loy)
Mark Cloostermans

After three books, we have a fairly clear picture of what interests Jan Van Loy: modern, over-indulged, people and their relationship to the gilded cage in which they live. That theme gives scope for a lot of humour and for feelings. Thus far he has given his readers mainly pleasure, because if there is one thing that sticks out a mile, it is that Van Loy is an extremely talented story-teller, particularly of stories to do with freedom and all the illusions that go with it. And thanks to his previous history as someone who spent years as an unemployed layabout, he is also someone who knows how it feels to pursue a dream.

How the Form Forms Itself. Recent Developments in the Work of Composer JacobTV
Emile Wennekes

Over the course of music history, the 'forma formata' has achieved supremacy. JacobTV’s current work calls this into question. His ‘Grab it!’ is not a composition in the traditional sense; it is more of a performative concept. Ter Veldhuis thusly aligns himself with the true innovators from musical history. Whereas a groundbreaking composer such as Luciano Berio repeatedly enriched the virtuoso solo performance in his 'Sequenzas', Ter Veldhuis is now augmenting music with an adaptive format, like an artist who chooses to depict the same landscape in pencil, oil paint, watercolours, pastel, photographs or video. Reproducing the same image in a variety of materials can suddenly create new dimensions with many different meanings.

Interviews with the Dead. Heddy Honigmann: Memory Made Visible
Karin Wolfs

Heddy Honigmann transforms silent monuments into speaking stones whose expressive power is universal. This is an art in which she has no equal, and one that has won her many awards as a maker of documentary films. The faces that Honigmann presents in her films are never just talking heads; they are faces that speak to us and come to life through their stories. Honigmann does not interview these people; she has a conversation with them. In interviews, the answers are often fixed beforehand, but Honigmann wants to be surprised by her conversations. She always keeps the focus firmly on the unadorned storytellers, avoiding any prettification, because that would detract from what her work is all about: making visible the stories behind the faces.

Walking as an Art Form. The Work of Francis Alÿs
Anne-Marie Poels

Can artistic interventions create a context for change? This is the question that visual artist Francis Alÿs asks himself. In his work the essence lies often in a transient action (such as a walk in the streets), which leaves behind no piece of art except for a film recording and some documentation. This immaterial manner of working is a theme that runs right through the oeuvre of Alÿs, who was born Francis Alijs in Antwerp in 1959, trained as an architect and architectural historian in Doornik and Venice, and moved to Mexico in 1987 as a volunteer on a construction project.

Constant: The End of the Avant-Garde
Rudy Hodel

After his start as a CoBrA-painter, Constant was to be the designer, theoretician and spokesman of his one-man-movement New Babylon. He constructed innumerable mysterious models, wrote countless articles, gave lectures all over Europe and exhibited his drawings and models as an architect. But all in vain. When the social revolution failed to materialise and the whole project remained in the realm of ideas, he not only broke with the project but also with the traditional concept of the avant-garde. Once more he felt free to devote himself to his former passion: painting. For the last thirty years of his life he dedicated himself to well-crafted, classically constructed paintings, watercolours and drawings. Yet the break with his own past was anything but total. For the work of this period, no less impressive than what had gone before, also deals with Constant’s longstanding themes: war, the nomadic gypsy life, and above all freedom.

Between the Lines of the World. Klaas Verplancke, an Illustrator with Passion
Annemie Leysen

Klaas Verplancke is one of the most important representatives of the ‘Flemish school’: a group of ‘young savages’ who are revitalising Flemish illustration and causing more and more of a stir both at home and abroad. Both in Flanders and beyond his work is constantly winning prizes and can be found in translated editions almost all over the world. He is always on the lookout for new challenges, and as a consequence his work is constantly developing. He refuses to sit back in the comfortable security of a ‘Verplancke signature’ and an established position. Over the years he has evolved from handy ‘gap-filler’ to an immensely inspired artist of exceptional virtuosity, an ‘illustrator’ (as he likes to describe himself) who tells stories in words and pictures with vintage and sturdy professionalism. With humour and gravitas, at once light-footed and philosophical, he explores the world around him with amazement and masterfully depicts what he finds there ‘between the lines’.

The Tale of a Frog. Max Velthuijs, an Artist with More than One Talent
Joke Linders

All over the world the friendly, green, ever-so-naïve Frog in his red and white striped swimming-trunks is a much loved figure in families, schools, nurseries and libraries. His father and creator Max Velthuijs, a modest Dutch artist who was ‘only trying to do the best he could’ never achieved the same fame as his green alter ego. He died on January 25, 2005, only four months after he received the Hans Christian Andersen Award for Illustrations in Cape Town, still busily creating new stories about his best friend Frog. The great international success of the Frog books came relatively late in Velthuijs’ life, at a time when most people give up work and settle into retirement. Not so with Velthuijs, who became world famous on reaching his eightieth birthday.

Hasselt: The Taste of the City
Derek Blyth

In Hasselt there’s no big square, no great art collection, none of the sense of ancient history you feel in nearby towns like Tongeren or Maastricht. Yet it’s somehow quietly appealing. At the end of his day in Hasselt, Derek Blyth took a free bus back to the station and caught the train to Brussels, thinking over what he had experienced. He hadn’t seen any famous paintings, or discovered any memorable cafe, but he had smelled coriander and tasted jenever and finally come to understand the stubborn local conviction that this is the best of all possible towns in the best of all possible provinces.

Remco Campert and the Dubious Lightness of Being (with an extract from ‘Life is Luverly’ and Five Poems by Remco Campert)
Cyrille Offermans

If ever a writer in Dutch literature was blessed with eternal youth, that writer was Remco Campert. For decades his books bore witness to an almost provocative insouciance, which was perfectly expressed by the boyish, slightly mocking laugh in most of his portraits. Campert – poet, short-story writer, later also a columnist – seemed to be immune to the serious side of life, to brooding introspection, to the regrets and cynicism of the ageing writer. No greyness, no Calvinist gloom; in Campert’s universe every day was a party. Until in 2004 he came out with a short novel, A Love in Paris (Een liefde in Parijs), followed in 2006 by The Satin Heart (Het satijnen hart): books which are not only about Campert’s escape from the ‘dreadful joylessness of life in the Netherlands’, but also about the implications and consequences of that escape. Both books lend themselves to being read as a commentary on the ode to frivolity, the lack of concern, and the irresponsibility of the early short stories and novels.

The Last Belgians? The German-Speaking Community in Belgium
Jeroen Dewulf

Whenever the King of Belgium enters the federal parliament, he is officially announced in Dutch, French and German – De koning, le roi, der König. In fact, contrary to the widespread assumption that Belgium is a bilingual (French/Dutch) country, German is also an official language in the Kingdom of Belgium. Because of their patriotic disposition, the approximately 73,000 German-speaking Belgians are often referred to as ‘the last real Belgians,’ as opposed to the Walloons and particularly the Flemish who increasingly identify themselves with their own region. In recent decades Belgium has become a multilingual nation that, paradoxically, no longer projects itself on the basis of its multilingual Belgian identity, but rather on each area’s local, monolingual identity. In the eyes of many, Belgian identity has become an empty box, an anachronistic creed that survives only in a handful of nostalgic patriots, the royal family, the national soccer team, the smurfs and…the German-speaking community. A closer look at this community’s position within the Belgian state, however, allows a totally different interpretation, one which we might even call: ‘the Belgian of the future.’

From Armed Peace to Permanent Crisis. Cracks in the Belgian Consultative Model
Marc Hooghe
Luc Huyse

Belgium’s political system is by definition notably divided. There are, of course, the traditional differences between labour and capital, and the associated socio-economic conflicts. And as in many traditionally overwhelmingly Catholic countries a conflict also developed between the Catholic Church and those who sought to reduce that church’s impact on public life. A third fault line is of course linguistic-political, with a sometimes sharp division between Dutch-speakers and French-speakers. Despite the presence in the Belgian political system of these three fundamental antagonisms, we have to state that the country has never descended into extreme violent unrest. That in itself is relatively exceptional; other divided societies, such as Lebanon, Cyprus or Northern Ireland, have indeed suffered this type of conflict. However, the differences did not disappear in Belgium, they lay dormant under the surface. But at least the pacification mechanisms did manage to prevent a complete implosion of the political system. The fundamental question now is whether these trusted pacification rules have lost their meaning. It does indeed look as if the old mechanisms are now a good deal less self-evident. So, is the Belgian pacification model finished? To answer that we must first look back and see why this model was able to function so successfully in the past. At the end of their article, the authors come to the conclusion that the old prescriptions for the Belgian model do not work very well any more. But that is not to say that Belgium is likely to fall apart. As Belgians tend to put it, one can easily operate to separate Siamese twins. But if the twins are joined at the head, there is no way they can be separated without fatal consequences.

UNStudio: Architecture between Art and Airport
Dieter De Clercq

Unlike many architects of their generation, at UNStudio they have no need to cling dogmatically to any particular idiom or theory. Although Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos have expressed their views on architecture exhaustively in various articles and books, it is above all the buildings themselves that – often literally – unfold and develop their ideas. They generate new forms of organisation and elicit contrasting interpretations, thus expanding our understanding of them. UNStudio creates experiential architecture, ‘architecture between art and airport’, as Van Berkel and Bos themselves put it. They see the network of airports as a hyper-condensed city where fiction and reality are constantly clashing, as a hectic and transient world where commerce reigns supreme and where such emotions as fear, happiness and sadness are experienced to extremes. At the other end of the spectrum is art, which is associated with purity, contemplation and reflection. It is in this area of tension between the sublime and the commonplace that UNStudio’s experiential architecture unfolds for the viewer, user or occupant.

The Battle for Quality. The Strange Career of Gerard Mortier
Johan Thielemans

Gerard Mortier is currently regarded as an important authority in the international opera world. He has directed both the prestigious Salzburg Festival and the Paris Opera. That seems rather unreal. The principal reason for this is that Gerard Mortier comes from a country that had no great reputation for opera. Yet everyone has nothing but praise for Mortier as an authority, a source of inspiration and a moderniser; people describe him as enthusiastic, visionary, tireless, original and gifted. But sometimes his dreams have fallen foul of harsh reality.

Portrait of the Artist as a Posthumous Work in Progress. Van Eyck and the Politics of Posterity
Jenny Graham

The posthumous rise to fame of the Flemish painter Jan Van Eyck (d.1441), who was celebrated during and after his lifetime but, like Vermeer, only reborn a hero in the nineteenth century, paints a particularly vivid picture of the shifting nature of artistic status. Above all, Van Eyck’s story reminds us that often canonical greats are not born but made, refashioned not simply to suit changing taste, but specific cultural politics. It took the interventions of Napoleon, the Treaty of Versailles and Hitler, for example, to bring Van Eyck to worldwide attention. His was a name remade not only by changing artistic fashions, but by the politics of nation-building during the emergence of modern Europe.

The Pen that Circumscribes a Being. A Portrait of Erik Spinoy (with four poems by Erik Spinoy)
Anneleen Decoux

Erik Spinoy, who nowadays finds it extremely irritating to be tarred with the postmodernist brush and who regards himself as an einzelgänger, an individualist, in the tradition of the Flemish modernists Paul Van Ostaijen and Hugo Claus, regularly re-invents himself. It is, however, possible to point to many constant features in his poetry, the principal one being its high quality. The oeuvre of Erik Spinoy is a feast.

Staring through the Surface at an Elusive Truth. Viviane Sassen’s Sense of Image
Jellichje Reijnders

Photography appears to be Viviane Sassen’s way of confronting the friction between reality and truth. She goes to great lengths to compose the dream-like reality in the image, using clear cues to direct what she cannot control. She takes risks as she plays the aesthetic game. With unfailing intuition, she explores the unknowable potential, using her instinct to lend proportion to the inevitable absurdity and imperfection as to direct the credibility of the image.

American Dreams. Frank Lloyd Wright and the Netherlands
Hans Ibelings

Review of Herman van Bergeijk (ed.), Amerikaanse dromen: Frank Lloyd Wright en Nederland. Rotterdam: Uitgeverij 010, 2008, 192 pp.

New Opportunities, New Freedoms. Dutch Animated Film and the Digital Image Culture
Ton Gloudemans

In recent years a renaissance in the genre of the short animated film seems to have been taking place in the Netherlands. Never before have there been so many active producers of animation films. This is all to do with the digitisation of the image culture, which is radically changing the way films are produced, distributed and screened. The equipment and techniques for making animated films are becoming more and more user-friendly and also cheaper. Moreover, digitisation allows the makers of animated films to bring the various aspects of film-making increasingly under their own control. Animation is no longer a marginal phenomenon; it is shifting – as Minister of Education, Culture and Science Ronald Plasterk writes in his memorandum on animated film – towards the centre of image culture.

Flemish Popular Film: from 'Cut Loose' to 'Loft'
Erik Martens

With Cut Loose (Los), based on the novel by Tom Naegels, Jan Verheyen to some extent distances himself from the broadest conceivable audience and takes on a more social, and therefore less popular, topic. Not long after Cut Loose came the release of Erik Van Looy’s long-awaited film Loft. The actualisation and finish of Loft is extremely meticulous, undertaken with great professionalism and with a high production value.

Away from the Dutch Clay. Alize Zandwijk’s Theatre
Wijbrand Schaap

Alize Zandwijk, since 2006 artistic director of the Ro Theatre in Rotterdam, is one of the most interesting theatre directors in the Dutch-speaking world. Her work has by now been seen in many other parts of Europe, yet in her own country it hardly receives the acclaim it deserves. This will probably change now that she also has a foothold in Belgium as a regular guest director at the Royal Flemish Theatre. The odds are, though, that she will move to Germany, following in the footsteps of Luk Perceval and Johan Simons.

The First Replica of the Halve Maen
Lucas Ligtenberg

Helping to celebrate Henry Hudson’s arrival 400 years ago on the shores of what is now New York, will be a replica of his ship the Halve Maen. This ship has been sailing up and down the Hudson River for many years. Captain Chip Reynolds witnessed the attack on the Twin Towers on September 11 2001 while his Halve Maen was moored in the Hudson in New York City. This is the second replica of the Halve Maen, after the first came to a sad end in upstate New York.

In Love with the Neighbours Opposite. Lisa Jardine’s Enthusiasm for the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic
Roelof van Gelder

Review of Lisa Jardine, Going Dutch. How England Plundered Holland’s Glory. New York: HarperCollins, 2008, 406 pp.

Birth of a Nation. Belgium and the Treaty of London
Romain Van Eenoo

On April 19 1839 the European Great Powers signed the 24 Articles of the Treaty of London and by doing so legally dissolved the ‘United Kingdom of the Netherlands’. From then on Belgium and the Netherlands would go their separate ways. It was a painful break that had been building up over many years, and its effects would reverberate for many decades to come.

A Calvinist Country?
Mirjam van Veen

For many people Calvinism is inextricably bound up with Dutch history and culture, and the commemoration of Calvin’s five hundredth birthday in 2009 may well confirm that impression. Calvinism was an important feature in the Dutch landscape, but the same was true of other Christian persuasions. On a number of points, such as the tense relationship towards the government and an activist desire to improve the world, we may perhaps speak of a Calvinist influence. More important than Calvinism in the shaping of Dutch culture, however, was the country’s religious diversity.

Sojourner Truth was once Isabella Van Wagenen. Dutch Culture and Language among African-Americans
Lucas Ligtenberg

Sojourner Truth, the United States’ best-known African-American woman of the nineteenth century, grew up speaking Dutch. The narrative of Sojourner Truth is one example of how widespread the Dutch language and culture were among African-Americans during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Awater in the UK. Martinus Nijhoff’s First English Volume
Thomas Möhlmann

Exactly sixty years after ‘Awater’ could first be read in England in a periodical, with an Anvil publication the Dutch poet Martinus Nijhoff will finally get what he has always deserved: his first UK volume. Hopefully, and probably, it will not be another sixty years before somebody takes the next step and publishes a more comprehensive Nijhoff anthology in English.

The Father of Angels. A Novel by Stefan Brijs
Daan Cartens

Stefan Brijs’ Angel Maker is a highly accomplished novel with many qualities. He offers us more than just a page turner, which of course the book also is: to quote the reviewer of the English translation in SFX Magazine, the novel ‘has superglue-soaked covers; you can’t put it down... compulsive reading... This is a great big clunking fist of a book. Prepare to be knocked speechless.’ The author has managed to build a highly topical social issue into his own imaginative world, a world dominated by the quest for identity, a world in which the dividing lines between good and evil are mainly a matter of points of view and perspective, all unfolding, as the reviewer in The Independent states, in this ‘tall tale of angelic sons and lofty ideals’

Wayward Authenticity. Paul Van Nevel, Musician and Expert in the Art of Living
Simon Van Damme

More than anyone the Flemish conductor and musician Paul Van Nevel finds himself caught between these two extremes. His career, which now spans almost forty years, is an exciting tight-rope dance between the faithful and the wayward, watched by many and regularly greeted with cries of astonishment and admiration.

Learning to Live with Uncertainty. A Portrait of Abram de Swaan
Rob Hartmans

Abram de Swaan, who in 2008 won the P.C. Hooft Prize, the highest literary award in the Netherlands, for his essays, has never allowed his curiosity to be shackled by any one doctrine, political tendency, research method, or even by a single academic discipline.

Robbert Dijkgraaf: a Mathematical Physicist Throws the Windows Wide Open
Dirk van Delft

Robbert Dijkgraaf, who took over as President of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie voor Wetenschap-pen, KNAW) on 19 May 2008, is a man of many talents. A brilliant mathematical physicist, he is a passionate champion of his own field of study and a talented populariser who has also made a name for himself as an artist. The youngest president in the history of the KNAW, Dijkgraaf is the ideal person to promote science in the Netherlands, with his great enthusiasm and strong sense of social responsibility.

The Idiosyncratic Philosophy of Herman De Dijn
Guido Vanheeswijck

Herman De Dijn’s philosophy has never been a purely intellectual game. With him, as with every important philosopher, it has always been a matter of commitment, in the service of which philosophy was used. So for many people De Dijn has been a thorn in their flesh. But then, in philosophical circles that is actually the greatest compliment.

Herman Van Rompuy Succeeds Yves Leterme
Gerald de Hemptinne

Since the 30th December 2008 a new Prime Minister has been running Belgium: the Flemish Christian Democrat Herman Van Rompuy (1947-). The man has a long experience of the wheels of the State.

The Fortis Saga
Christiaan Berendsen

About the decline, fall and new lease of life of the Belgian-Dutch banking and insurance group Fortis.

Belgian Society and Politics
Marc Hooghe

Review of the first two issues of the new annual review 'Belgian Society and Politics'

‘Pauper Paradise’: the Dutch Re-education Laboratory
Dorien Kouijzer

Journalist Suzanna Jansen’s Pauper Paradise (Het pauperparadijs) is a clever and moving description of the attempts to re-educate and integrate ‘the dregs of humanity’ in the Netherlands in the period from 1823 to 1973. Her family history leads us through the utopian projects that were intended to combat pauperism in the nineteenth century.

Mark Manders: Artist under the Table
Frank van der Ploeg

With his creations Mark Manders constructs a universe of his own within the world in which he finds himself. In doing so he makes use of images and language. The archetypical artist is absent in his spaces – and when he’s not lying under the table, he’s looking down from above at the dioramas that are his own creations. Mark Manders keeps his distance.

A Hundred Years of Dutch Design
Marc Dubois

Review of Mienke Simon-Thomas, Dutch Design. A History. London: Reaktion Books, 2008.